Faces from the past: images from Sydney's back lanes and alley ways

This video presentation features a selection of photographs from the NSW State archives collection showing city dwellers going about their daily business.

It is accompanied by Fabian LoSchiavo's moving narration of the famous Henry Lawson's poem 'Faces in the Street'.

Extract
'They lie, the men who tell us, for reasons of their own,
That want is here a stranger, and that misery's unknown;
For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet
My windowsill is level with the faces in the street
Drifting past, drifting past,
To the beat of weary feet
While I sorrow for the owners of the faces in the street.'

The images used in the presentation have been drawn from the many thousands of photographs, dating from the late 19th Century to the present, which can be viewed in Photo Investigator which is available on State Records' website at: http://investigator.records.nsw.gov.au/asp/photosearch/.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Australian history
• NSW
• Sydney
• people
• photographs

[staterecordsnsw]

Thank you YouChwb for your comment on ‘Faces from the past: images from Sydney's back lanes and alley ways’. The video aims to showcase the diversity of State Records’ photographic resources, in this instance showing city dwellers going about their daily business. The words of Henry Lawson’s poem ‘Faces in the Street’ were included to add interest to the selection and to reflect the theme of History Week 2010.

[YouChwb]

Some of these people were convicted murderers as noted in another part of your website and not the so-called innocent battlers that you have portrayed them.And what does an image of Queen Elizabeth which was taken in the 1950's,have to do with the 1800's?

This is a project failed.

[UoNCC]

Fantastic!